5 Things Successful Companies Do When Setting Up Their Virtual Assistant

You’ve become interested in having a virtual assistant for your company but are unsure how to start. What should be done? How? What is important? What is less important?

These are all questions we get when we meet with companies. They wish to know what is the best practice in setting up a bot and what to keep in mind. Having deployed dozens of bots we have a learned a thing or two and we’ve highlighted some of the key lessons to keep in mind below.

Each of them deserves more attention than we can give in this short post and I’ll follow-up in the next posts with more insight into them.

That being said, here are the key things to decide and keep in mind when thinking of setting up a bot:

1️⃣ – Pick a use case for your bot. Is it customer service? Is it selling products online? Build a case what is that you want to achieve with the bot? Many want to offer a 24/7 channel for customers to get in touch or make their staff more efficient or understand what customers actually want to know about your company. All are good things to consider a bot. Pick yours.

2️⃣ – Where do you wish to put your bot? A good option is to put the bot on your website inside a chat window. Another is to implement in Facebook Messenger. Or if you have a mobile app, you can include it there as well. Consider where do you currently have customer traffic coming in and pick that channel.

3️⃣ – Pick your language. It is easiest to start to have the bot in one language. If your website is in English then train a bot in English. If your website is in Latvian and Russian then pick the language that gets used the most. When you start out with one language you can learn how users interact with your bot and you then take these lessons to your next iterations. If, however, two languages are crucial, then include both bots in the same channel through language detection.

4️⃣ – Automate the 20% of user questions that give you 80% of volume. Automation with chatbots is all about getting the most value out of volumes. Go for the low hanging fruits. The questions and issues that hundreds and thousands of your customers have. These are also the questions that take most of the time for your colleagues to answer. Or if you run a sales bot on your website, build it so to respond to the most common questions about a certain product or topic.

5️⃣ – Have bot-to-human handoff available. Bot cannot solve everything all the time. Humans are still needed in the process. Make sure your bot is capable of directing unanswered questions to humans for follow-up. Alternatively build your bot so that it is capable of giving people directions how to get in touch with human support.

There you have it. 5 things that you need to keep in mind when starting a bot project. Make sure your whole team understands these topics when you get started with your bot project and ask your tech provider about these topics.

Resolving them early on will make your project better and more likely to result in positive outcome. If you have questions, reach out 👉 indrek (at) alphablues (.) com and we’ll get back to you in 24 hours to offer our feedback.